Saturday, February 23, 2013

How India censored one of its own websites

India’s University Grants Commission (UGC), amongst its other responsibilities, determines and maintains the standards of institutions of higher education in India.
As a part of this duty, it had warned students that an institution
called IIPM (Indian Institute of Planning and Management) is not a
recognised university and does not have the right to issue certificates.
The message on the commission’s website has now been blocked, following
an interim court order by the Gwalior High Court in relation to a case
filed by one of the companies owned by IIPM’s head — Arindam Chaudhuri —
seeking to block defamatory content against his institution. The UGC
site is not the only website affected by the order. On 15 February, the
Department of Telecommunication (DoT) requested Internet Service
Licensees to block 73 URLs carrying content criticising IIPM. The sites included news websites such as The Times of India, Wall Street Journal, The Indian Express, Firstpost, Outlook magazine, Economic Times, Caravan
magazine, the popular blog Kafila, and even some satirical websites
like Faking News and The UnReal Times. The court blocked a total of 61
URLs.

The court did not inform affected parties of the block order. The founder of Kafila, Shivam Vij gave a statement
to Firstpost on the matter saying that the move was “against the
principle of natural justice. The court blocked the URL of my blog
without giving me a chance to defend myself.”

Indian news agencies and think-tanks have been questioning the method
and the necessity of such an order by the court, and whether or not it
opened the door to censorship. Noting the value given to free speech by
courts in democracies, experts at the Center for Internet and Society
has expressed fears that “the court order has moved away from the
settled principles of law while awarding an interim injunction for
blocking of content related to IIPM”. The hurry in which the court
ordered websites’ blocking is worrying, and even India’s government is
planning to challenge the court order, as it involved one of its own sites (UGC).

The lack of transparency in this action also points to two facets of
the fight for online freedom in India. The first is that internet
service providers are the vehicle through which sites can be blocked
when specific sites do not comply. In an interview with Firstpost,
Chaudhuri claimed that Google had failed to comply with a previous
court order to remove “defamatory” content about his business. The other
is that despite the length to which Chaudhuri has gone to curb any
criticism of his institution, in a wired world it is next to impossible.
Hackers have not only crashed his website, but social media users have also slammed
Chaudhuri’s move to censor the web, and #IIPM trended on Twitter for
days following the incident. They have, in turn, been copying the
blocked text of censored articles online.
In the meantime, it has now been revealed that IIPM is actually licensed under the Shops and Establishments Act, rather than the UGC. It will be tough to stop this information from going viral, but Chaudhuri can certainly try.

4 comments:

Well, a man who has been counting his chickens long before they hatched will find them all coming to IIPM to roost.

Arindam Chaudhuri should know better than to try shutting internet voices up. This country desperately needs genuinely safe space for the free discussion of vital issues. The internet is imperfect, but is IIPM's campus any better?